Ethical advertising or smart advertising?

During our discussions on photography and advertising, we brought up the promotion of certain causes in advertising and whether or not we should be praising those companies for their efforts or questioning their motives. I’m not sure most companies are truly all that invested with the causes they claim to support so much as they are interested in the consumers who promote that cause. While consumers become more critical and more concerned with “going green” and other such ethical causes, companies must keep up. Consumers want to support companies they consider to be ‘ethical,’ not companies that employ questionable tactics in advertising like promoting certain gender stereotypes or utilizing sex in way that may be considered degrading, like the Keira Knightley ad for Chanel that someone brought in. With society becoming more and more critical of such ads, phrases like “natural beauty” and “real women have curves” and “love your body” are cropping up again and again.

One campaign I am particularly interested in is the Dove campaign for “real beauty,” which annoys me for a number of reasons. Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of such a message when coming from a company that sells beauty products, I question what exactly they mean by “real beauty” or “real women,” which is what the claim to feature in their ads. The idea of a “real woman” seems to suggest that some women are not real, either because they are famous or because they conform to current societal standards of beauty by embracing the ever so coveted protruding hipbone look. Despite the negative attitude they promote towards the skinny standard, they don’t seem to promote women of very many sizes. All of these women look to be within close range of one another in terms of weight. Furthermore, the thinnest woman in the picture is the only woman pictured from straight ahead without another woman covering part of her body or some sort of pose cleverly manipulated to accentuate her curves while simultaneously masking the size of her thighs. None of the women are significantly overweight to begin with, nor are any of them underweight.

This image also mirrors a lot of the problematic phrases constantly used to promote healthier body images among women, as most of them simply present a different idea of what the standard should be. “Real women have curves” doesn’t say to me that women come in all shapes in sizes and should be proud of their natural shape; on the contrary, it suggests that all women are beautiful so long as they aren’t too thin. I’m not sure how much better that is than the expectation that all women share Barbie’s measurements — the reality is that some women are naturally thin. Some of us are never going to have hips and large breasts. Society might tell me I’m not a Real Woman because my ribs don’t show quite enough, but now Dove is telling me that I’m not a real Woman because I need to gain 30 pounds.

In terms of race, this ad is also very interesting. They at first appear to present a range of colours; it is strange, though, that despite the fact that women of colour have a wider variety in skin tone, there are four different shades of white in this picture. Of the two women of colour, neither one is particularly dark-skinned, and the woman all the way to the left is hardly a shade darker than the woman to her right. The woman closest to the center of the image, besides being the thinnest, is also the lightest and only blonde. In addition to that, all Real Women appear to have perfectly white, straight teeth and glowing skin. They may also belong to the anti-cellulite campaign that Margaret mentioned, but that’s an assumption on my part…

The Dove campaign reminds me of Nike’s “If You Let Me Play” commercials from the mid-90s, which I first read critiques of in my psychology class with Dean Schuster last year (Psych 421: Intersections of Sport & Sexuality). Those commercials seem to have been received very well by the general public, getting a lot of praise for promoting women in sports, but its underlying subtext promotes a very different message rooted in notions of white male dominance. Besides the audacity that these girls are asking for permission to play rather than implying they should be “allowed” to play by default, the vulnerable-looking girls Nike chooses to feature present an interesting image of girls in America, with the white girls receiving significantly more airtime and filling the most prominent sections of the commercial. An article I read in that class by Shelley Lucas goes into much further detail, but I don’t want to stray too far from the topic of advertising and photography. What it comes down to is the fact that in these ads, Nike is trying to inconspicuously promote their company and products by presenting a message that will be well-received in a more modern America, but its hypocritical use of certain prejudices and biases to appeal to the American public reveal the truth behind their motives.

In the end, advertising always has one goal: to reach to their demographic. As our morals change as a society, advertising will change to appeal to those morals, but it does not necessarily mean that the advertisers have suddenly embraced our cause or denounced the sexist and racist attitudes that still govern our country and society — those attitudes simply become more covert as these values slip out of our consciousness and take on less obvious and more institutionalized forms.

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